Organizational Adoption of Blockchain Technology: An Ecosystem Perspective

Abstract

Organizations of all sizes are developing blockchain projects in hopes of reaping benefits from this technology. Despite rising academic interest in blockchain technology, extant research has primarily focused on technical or design challenges and improvements, with scant scholarly attention being paid to factors contributing to the adoption of blockchain technologies by organizations, which presents an opportunity for us to undertake this theory guided empirical investigation. Drawing on the Technological-Organizational-Environmental (TOE) framework and extending the framework by considering the network of actors comprising an enterprise blockchain ecosystem, we identify a set of factors most applicable to blockchain adoption and developed a research model that examines how different technological (i.e., perceived usefulness, compatibility, relative advantage, complexity, and scope of technology), organizational (i.e., top management support, organizational readiness, firm size, and firm centralization), and environmental ecosystem actors (i.e., business competition, trading partner support, technology vendor support, governmental support, and customer support) influence organizational adoption of blockchain technology. We also propose a cross-industry field survey to test our hypotheses.